The Multi-Site Dashboard: Which Platforms Actually Have One

Building one website well and managing forty are unrelated skills, and most website builders are designed for the first. The moment a studio passes roughly ten retained clients, the daily problem stops being design and becomes inventory: which sites have unpublished changes, which subscriptions renew this month, which client has been locked out again.

A multi-site dashboard is the tool for that problem. Two platforms on this rack have built a serious one, two have something partial, and one has nothing to speak of. The difference correlates almost exactly with how each platform counts sites.

What a real multi-site dashboard does

Four things, in rough order of how much time they save.

One list of every site, with state visible without opening each one. Published or not, plan tier, when it was last changed.

One place for billing, so renewals are a schedule rather than a series of surprises arriving in whichever inbox happened to receive them.

Permissions applied across the list, so adding a contractor to three projects is one action and removing them is one action, rather than six logins.

Something that tells you when a site needs attention without you going looking — a report, an alert, a status column.

A dashboard that only does the first of these is a list. That is better than nothing, and it is what most platforms mean when they use the phrase.

Wix Studio: the strongest of them, and it is not close

Wix's agency page describes managing unlimited client websites, organising projects, handling team permissions and managing billing, all from a single dashboard. That sentence is the product.

The word doing the work is "unlimited". Because Wix Studio treats the workspace rather than the site as the billing and organisational unit, adding the forty-first client does not add a forty-first thing to administer. The dashboard scales with your book instead of against it.

Around it sit the features that make a shared list usable by more than one person: real-time concurrent editing, on-canvas commenting, shared design libraries and project management tools. Concurrent editing in particular is a multi-site feature disguised as an editor feature — it is what stops two people in a busy studio colliding on the same page.

Wix also publishes automated reports, described as sending clients scheduled updates to keep them informed. For a retained book, that is the cheapest client-retention mechanism available: a monthly email that quietly reminds forty clients what they are paying for, which nobody has to write.

The full reading of that page, including the three things it does not say, is on the Wix Studio agency sheet.

Duda: a real dashboard on a per-site model

Duda's client-management page describes seeing all of your sites from a single dashboard with comprehensive permission management, alongside role-based access control from the Agency plan, inline comments, live previews and scheduled client performance emails.

Functionally that covers all four of the things above, and the reporting is genuinely good. What differs is the economics underneath it.

Duda counts sites. The Agency and White Label tiers include four published projects; Basic and Team include one. Everything beyond that is charged at $17 a month or $168 a year on Team and above, $19 or $171 on Basic. So a forty-site book is a tier plus thirty-six line items.

That is not hidden and it is not unreasonable — the per-site annual rate is competitive. But it means the dashboard and the bill grow together, which is a different planning problem from Wix Studio's flat workspace. An agency choosing between the two on dashboard quality alone is asking the wrong question; the real question is whether a per-site cost that scales linearly suits how you charge. The tier detail is on the Duda agency sheet.

Webflow: workspaces, which are nearly the same idea

Webflow's organising unit is the workspace, and it does much of what a multi-site dashboard does, split across two paid layers in a way that takes some getting used to.

A workspace holds sites, seats and staging. The free Starter workspace holds unlimited paid hosted sites but only 2 staging sites with 2 pages each — enough to manage live work, not enough to develop new work. Core at $19 a month billed yearly raises that to 10 staging sites with 300 pages each and adds code export and shared libraries. Growth at $49 makes staging unlimited and adds site-level roles, publishing permissions, password protection and 301 redirects.

Meanwhile every published site carries its own site plan — Basic at $15 a month yearly, Premium at $25 — so the per-site cost is real even though the workspace is flat.

Where Webflow beats both of the above is the exit column. Site transfer moves a site with its paid plan and connected domains into a client's own workspace, and client payments let the client pay while the site stays in yours. Both require a Freelancer or Agency workspace. Those help pages block automated reading, so that is corroborated rather than read first-hand, and it is worth confirming directly before it becomes load-bearing.

Squarespace and Framer: not really, for different reasons

Squarespace does not have a multi-site dashboard in the agency sense, because on the Circle model the subscriptions usually belong to the clients. There is no account holding forty sites to display. Circle gives you discounts on new annual subscriptions and extended trials — three months on Silver, six on Gold, twelve on Platinum — which are useful things, but they are not inventory management. A studio running thirty Squarespace clients is running thirty separate relationships, and no dashboard changes that.

Framer is a design tool with a project list. Viewers are free, editor seats are cheap, and there is a hard ceiling of ten users with edit access on Basic and Pro. There is no billing consolidation, no client reporting and no agency layer. For a studio running a handful of design-led projects it is entirely adequate. For a book of forty it is not the tool.

The thing a dashboard cannot fix

One caution, because a good dashboard makes a studio feel more organised than it is.

Every platform here shows you the state of your sites. None of them shows you the state of your relationships: which client has not replied to an email in five weeks, which retainer is being quietly under-delivered, which site is technically fine and commercially dead. That information does not live in any platform on this rack and no reporting feature will surface it.

A studio that moves to a multi-site dashboard and stops doing a monthly manual pass over its client list has traded one blind spot for another. The dashboard is inventory. The relationship review is the business, and it is still done by a person with a list.

The question underneath all of it

It is not "which dashboard is best". It is how does this platform count, because that decides everything else.

A platform that counts workspaces gives you a dashboard that gets more valuable as the book grows and a bill that does not move much. A platform that counts sites gives you a bill that tracks the book precisely, which is easier to pass through to clients and harder to absorb when a client stops paying.

Neither is right. Which one suits you depends on whether you charge per site or charge a retainer, and that is a decision about your business rather than about software. The same fork runs through agency plan or a plan per client, and it is the reason the best website builder for agencies rack ranks on permissions rather than on features — because the features look similar and the economics underneath them do not.